New Pornographers

It's a good time to be Carl Newman. His third album as the primary songwriter of the Canadian pop supergroup the New Pornographers, Twin Cinema, was met with the same breathless critical acclaim as its predecessors. With their latest album, the New Pornographers also reached a new commercial peak, debuting at #44 on the Billboard charts. Pitchfork caught up with Newman prior to his group hitting the road in support of its new album, and he discussed the surprise success of his band, his songwriting process, and how he's adjusted to playing live with fellow New Pornographers songwriter Dan Bejar and without vocalist Neko Case.

Pitchfork: You've been in bands since the early 1990s, and it has taken you a while to get to your current level of success. Do you think that was a good thing, having to work at it for a while?

Carl Newman: I think so. For the longest time, I was just playing music and not really expecting any success-- just kind of doing it because I liked doing it. While doing that, I went on a lot of shitty tours, playing to nobody, so yeah, I think it makes me appreciate it. The Pornographers have been popular for a few years now, but it still shocks me. I remember thinking we were hugely popular when we sold 15,000 records, and now this one sold 30,000 in two weeks. I'm grateful for the whole thing.

Pitchfork: The first album was recorded as a special project, so how did the process of writing the second and third records change after the band became a full-time thing?

Newman: You know, the funny thing is that nothing changed about the way we make the records except that John [Collins] and Dave [Carswell] get paid more now. You know, they did it for two or three thousand dollars on Mass Romantic, but now there's some money so people can get paid for their work. The whole process is still the same-- hanging out in the studio, figuring out what works, overdubbing.

Pitchfork: When you made Mass Romantic, did you think that the project could be ongoing?

Newman: There were no plans, which I think was a great thing about it becoming popular. We weren't even planning on touring. We just put it out into the world, and we just kind of followed it. We weren't a really driven band, we were just following the laws of supply and demand. It's like, well, "If people want to see the New Pornographers, we'll go out and play for them." If no one had really cared about our record, I don't think we would have hit the road and slogged it out trying to convince people we were good.

Pitchfork: So then you end up making records and have to deal with people's expectations, which you didn't have to do at all up to that point. How did that go for you?

Newman: That was scarier for the third record, which had even more expectations. All we did was trust our instincts on the first record. We weren't trying to aim at any specific demographic or anything. So I think we've just gone into the the second and third record thinking, "Well, let's just do what we do," and make a record that we think is good. That's how we've done it from the beginning, so I hope that it still works. Maybe I think this because I started out for the longest time as a music fan, like I didn't pick up a guitar since I was 18, so I think a lot of making good music is just having good taste. You can just throw out a million ideas and try them all, and you just need to have the ability to tell the good ones from the bad. That's what seperates the bad songs from the good songs.

Pitchfork: Do you write songs specifically for the New Pornographers now? You also did The Slow Wonder, so is there a difference between an AC Newman song and a New Pornographers song?

Newman: I think there is. If you compare The Electric Version to The Slow Wonder, I think there definitely was. Making The Slow Wonder made me realize that I was going into uncharted waters doing the slower songs. In the end, those were some of my favorites on the record, and I carried that with me into the new New Pornographers record.

Pitchfork: Like "Falling Through Your Clothes"?

Newman: I don't know where that one came from. "Falling Through Your Clothes" was a total creation of technology. That whole cyclical chorus of the song was basically an outtake from The Electric Version which I didn't really like at all, but for some reason I just had some idea of taking these three sections and looping them. That whole part is a loop made out of three loops, and it was just a little project we did. I thought, "Hmm, that's weird sounding," and didn't think about it for a long time. Then a year later we listened to it and thought it was really cool, and I wrote a song around it.

"The Jessica Numbers" was the same thing. It came out of embedded loops. John was giving Dan [Bejar] and I a tutorial on Digital Performer, to show us how to create loops for when we are doing home recordings. It was like, "Here, I'll do a part then repeat it five times, and I'll take this part and repeat it three times, and I'll do this part twice." That became the opening, that sort of machine gun guitar riff on "The Jessica Numbers".

Pitchfork: Will you try to recreate those songs live?

Newman: Yeah, it's actually not that difficult. All we got to do is [sings the opening guitar part).

Pitchfork: "Falling Through Your Clothes" seemed to be the more difficult one.

Newman: Yeah. "Falling Through Your Clothes" is the one song on the record that I think that in order to make it work as a live song, we have to make it a little more intense. We have to make it a little more rock. It's going to sound like the record, but I think it will be for the best if we alter it a little bit. I'm looking forward to playing that one, it's going to be interesting.

Pitchfork: You're going to be touring with the full band for the first time. How are you preparing for that?

Newman: I'm looking forward to it. We just practiced with Dan a few days ago. It's strange because I think Dan is the wild card voice in the group. The rest of us have, for a lack of a better word, pretty voices. We all pride ourselves on harmonizing pretty tightly with each other, and so it was pretty cool to bring in Dan, who is the guy who sings on the record and wrote the songs, but when you play with him again, it feels kind of alien. We had a practice that was just mainly Dan's New Pornographers songs. "Breakin' The Law" and "Execution Day", and "Jackie" and "Testament To Youth In Verse". The three songs from the new record. I think it's going to be cool. Plus, Dan's a good friend of mine so it's going to be fun to have him around.

Pitchfork: Will Dan be playing any instruments, or only singing with you?

Newman: I think he's just going to be singing because he's going to be doing his Destroyer set, and I think he'd rather just come up and do his thing with a pint glass in one hand. I didn't want to burden him with too much. I also thought that it was conceivable that by the time our set hits, he might be so drunk that he would be incapable of playing an instrument. You have to plan ahead for those things.

Pitchfork: So Neko Case is also going to be coming back for that tour after playing some shows without her. How was it adjusting to her absence?

Newman: It was only in June that we started playing shows without her. For obvious reasons, the first couple shows seemed weird. We thought, "What are people going to think? Are people going to throw stuff at us? What if people only like us because Neko is in the band?" And then after a couple shows, we realized that wasn't the case. And it helps that Kathryn [Calder] is just really good. She's a great singer and also a great piano player, so musically she makes the band a lot better because we've got this extra virtuoso musician. Did you go to that Brooklyn show?

Pitchfork: Yes, I did. I thought that it came out pretty good.

Newman: That was fun. It just seemed weird that this was the biggest show that we've ever played, and we were playing it with this new lineup, and it made us realize that we can function as a band without Neko.

We always want to have Neko around to play with us, but I think that whole little trip was like an experiment because we had to start playing without Neko. If we were always waiting for Neko to play, then it would be another record that we didn't support and didn't tour. Neko knew all of this, so the whole situation works out pretty nicely.

Pitchfork: When you write the songs, are you ever writing parts and songs specifically for her to sing?

Newman: I don't really write for anybody-- it sort of unfolds during the making of the record. [Otherwise] I'd have to go through the hassle of figuring out what key works for them.

On the first two records I gave Neko the songs that I thought were the big pop hits, the really upbeat ones. I didn't want that to be clichéd, and so for her two big showcase moments on Twin Cinema, I gave her the two slowest songs on the record, which I thought was a good way of changing it up. Also, I thought it was a good way of drawing attention to the two slow songs on the record. I knew that there was going to be people who thought, "Oh, well this album isn't hyper enough."

Pitchfork: That was actually my first impression upon hearing the album. I had to kind of grow out of that feeling as I got to know the songs. I think that I had come to focus so much on the very energetic songs that I started to think that was what your band was. And it still kind of is, because even the quietest songs are pretty amped up.

Newman: It's true. Even when we try to break it down, we end up adding layers and having it end in some kind of rock way.

Pitchfork: It seemed like a lot of people, and I certainly was one of them, feel that Twin Cinema is more of a grower, as opposed to the last two which were more immediate. Was that something that you ever thought about? I realize that you're much closer to the songs than most anyone. Did it ever occur to you that they were a bit denser?

Newman: I could see that. I could kinda sense that happening during the recording of the album within the band. Sometimes I could be recording with John, and he wouldn't know where I was heading with something. When we started working on songs like "Bones Of An Idol" and "These Are The Fables" it seemed a little odd to him that I was basically bringing in these acoustic ballads. But as it unfolded I realized that John was really into them and I kind of imagined that would be the response of most people.

I wasn't really happy with Mass Romantic or The Electric Version at the end of recording them. I like them now, but when I finished both of them, I wasn't too sure if they came off the way I wanted them to. But for this record, at the end of it, I really liked the way it came out. Of course, I have no perspective, and I thought, "Can I be one of those people who thinks it is the best work when it's actually their shittiest work?" And I hope that I wasn't. But now that I see the press, I know that what I see in the record, a lot of other people do as well. That's convenient.

Pitchfork: If there's any criticism that comes up about the new record it's that the lyrics can be very obtuse. How accessible do you intend the lyrics to be?

Newman: Not particularly, but this album has the most narrative lyrics, definitely. I think that I was guilty on some songs like "Letter From an Occupant"-- that song's mostly gibberish. I just like the sound of the words. There's some idea behind it, it's basically just a really obscure break-up song, but on this one, I think the words evoke a bit more of a feeling. Other people might not be able to figure it out, but I can go through the lyrics and trace what they mean.

People have been singling out "Sing Me Spanish Techno", like, "What the hell does that mean?" That's a total nonsequitor, but it means something to me. I could go through the song line by line, and tell you what the song is about. A lot of this record, I think it's very hopeful. Maybe if you get really stoned and listen to it 10 times in a row, you begin to see that there are some themes.

Pitchfork: It seems like a lot of the lyrics imply this sort of heroic journey, with a lot of references to film, and you had mentioned someplace else that you had been influenced by Joseph Campbell while writing the record. The music itself often sounds epic and grand. Was that something that you had intentionally gone for with this album?

Newman: To a certain extent. It sounds really pretentious to say that our album is about the hero's journey, but I think a lot of this record as well as the other records, is just about ways of seeing the world, and the bizarre filters we have. I called the album Twin Cinema because I was thinking of the disconnect between the way we see the world and the way the world actually is. They are two different things. Also, the fact that in our culture, we're raised on so much entertainment that sometimes it's hard not to look at the world as fiction, some story that's unfolding.

That whole idea led into that concept of the hero's journey, because I was reading A Hero With a Thousand Faces, the Joseph Campbell book. It's basically about how almost every story ever told has a lot of the same basic elements that come from every single person's journey through life. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I talk about some epic heroic journey, but in a way, it's just sort of bland.

Pitchfork: Do you write most of the lyrics after the music is written?

Newman: Yeah, and that's the hardest part. The music is always the most important thing to me, the music and the melody, after that I'm just trying to figure out how to fit the words in there, because the words always have to have a certain feeling. There will be a song where I'll go "It has to have this." It has to have a P and an A sound, it has to have an R in it just because certain vowels and consonants just bend around the melody very nicely. Sometimes it's hard to work around those limitations. Sometimes there are lines that I don't want to use, and I try to change them, but I end up coming back to them because they fit too perfectly.

Pitchfork: What would be an example of that?

Newman: In "Miss Teen Wordpower", I didn't really want to sing "Nobody knows the wreck of a soul the way you do," but I couldn't get away from it. Even "Miss Teen Wordpower" was the initial title of the song, and that long was in there, but I thought it was kinda goofy, like I couldn't call a song "Miss Teen Wordpower". But, you know, months past and I tried rewriting it, and I thought, "No. This song is called 'Miss Teen Wordpower'. It's just the way it has to be." Luckily no one has made too much fun of me because of it. It worked out.

Newman: Yeah, I think every guy who likes indie rock has fallen in love with the archetype of the beautiful nerd. So I guess that's what that song is about.

Pitchfork: My friend had noticed that it's fairly common for you to make references to royalty, and suggested that I ask you about that. Do you have any idea why you're predisposed to those references?

Newman: We are Canadian, you know, we're part of the Commonwealth. We have the Queen on our money, it's bound to have an effect on us. No, that's bullshit. I don't know why. There must be some reason for it. Sometimes, even when I'm writing the lyrics, I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but then months will pass and I'll listen to it and I'll understand it completely. I think I trust myself in that most of what comes out of me will be honest. Even if it seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense, I realize that it does. It's hard to follow, and maybe there's a lot of subtext to it that nobody knows, so it makes it impossible to follow. So ask me in a few months why there's references to royalty. There's also been a lot of references to revolutions in the streets over the course of our albums, but I think that's kind of a Dan influence.

Pitchfork: I think that you're probably the most subtle political band that I can think of, almost to the point of it being kind of a subliminal thing. Did you ever read that thing Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker wrote about "The Laws Have Changed", the way he parsed the lyrics of that song? He was writing for Slate at the time.

Newman: No, what did he say?

Pitchfork: Basically he was thinking that you were drawing a line from primogeniture of pharaohs to George W. Bush.

Newman: Yeah. Well, that's more on "It's Only Divine Right". There was a definite feeling at the time when I was writing the lyrics for that album that I was pissed off at the state of the world. It seemed like, and it still kinda does, that America is like the Roman Empire run by this decadent dim-bulb emperor. That's what kind of inspired some of the lyrics. "It's Only Divine Right" was actually mainly inspired by reading about the Bush twins when one of them was in college in Austin, you'd always read about them getting arrested for trying to score beer. For some reason that just made me think of the decadent children of the emperor, like that was somehow the beginning of the fall.

Pitchfork: Do you ever worry that you're writing this songs with very clever concepts, but they might not be getting across because you're making some very obscure references and the lyrics aren't necessarily linear in the way most people expect?

Newman: Sometimes, but more than anything, I'm trying to communicate a feeling. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm trying to say and I can't piece it together into any kind of coherant thesis. Hopefully I'm just trying to evoke some kind of mood, and put some kind of idea in somebody's head. It's also just pop music, it's rock music, and if Marshall McLuhan or Harold Innis were looking at it, they would tell you that the genre of rock music isn't perhaps the best way to deliver a political message because it distorts it, it makes it into entertainment. Perhaps the best political message is just to speak it to somebody. That's just an idea. I think that's something I'm always writing about in songs, just how to mediate, how to present something, how it gets distorted.

Pitchfork: You're saying that you're a pop band, and that's how most people identify your band, but you don't actually have chart hits.

Newman: Twin Cinema went to #44! That's amazing for us.

Pitchfork: Is it frustrating to be writing these big pop songs that end up on the margins of the pop culture?

Newman: I don't even consider us to be on the margins. We're way more popular than I ever thought we would be. It's only in the last few years that it would seem even conceivable that a band like us would become really popular. Now I look at it, and go "Well, if Modest Mouse and the Shins and Death Cab are so popular, yeah, it's conceivable that it could happen for us too."